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Fugue
The term fugue was introduced, along with the words chace and caccia, to describe a piece of music based on canonic imitation (i.e. one voice 'chasing' another; the Latin fuga is related to both fugere: 'to flee' and fugare: 'to chase'). This is easy to hear in the music, because any fugue is primarily based on imitation. The difference between a fugue, and another piece where the parts simply imitate each other at the beginnings of phrases (a common compositional technique) is that in a good fugue there is always some element of the 'subject' (the initial phrase) present in at least one of the parts. Bach was the supreme master of this most demanding of all compositional disciplines, and though the writing of fugues is generally very formulaic, he manages to make his versions beautiful and lyrical - a real pleasure to listen to. It is thought that Bach composed his Art of Fugue for the Leipzig Society of Musical Sciences, which he joined in 1747. A basic tenet of this organization was that music represented mathematics in sound. The portrait on the left shows Bach proudly holding a manuscript of a short canon - the strictest type of fugue. 
Johann Sebastian Bach: Die Kunst der Fuge The Art of Fugue
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